welcome to the club Rudi!
it's the same here in oe6 and oe8. some enthusiast do regulary operation on repeaters up in the hills. and we did also invest alot into the technology..
but there is hope: many years atv contest have not been in interest but sich two year the headcount jumped from 2 OM into 15 OM into the contest. this have been the case because of a joint venture merger with microwave operation. this means the folks transfered the knowledge and started to develope more and more atv skills. so they will show up in the trivento contest tomorrow and have hopefully lots of fun with atv and contesting

so whats the core idea behind my writing. it would be easy to give up but i guess also some folks could be interessed in S5 as well. go to ham fairs, show the hobby, tease them with portsdown, langstone and more (yes: also software coding only OMs are as well amateur radio). show them the beauty and let the things develope. hook up cams to ballons or ships to generate interesting content, write in cq zrs regarding contest and atv dxpeditions (also 6m datv with sdrangel and pluto would be a teaser). show you content on qo100 as like as Stefan S51L does , be open for new but never do push people. either they do it voluntary or not. you'll see young oms will ask you what this is about, same as we started here. won't say we are in safe habour but i just wanted to share hope Rudi!
lep podrav Robert, 73 de oe6rke
ps: next change tomorrow in the contest, take pics and report to cqzrs

ps: the oe folks will be west of udine on a hill, shall be easy working (normally they listen to 430.500 simplex fm)